The Executive Committee of the Association for Computers and the Humanities is delighted to announce its fifth round of Microgrants.
ACH Microgrants were established to reward enterprising ideas that serve the digital humanities community. We especially value proposals from emerging scholars and DH practitioners that promise to expand the community, create new content or analyses of existing content, or build links with other DH initiatives.
Examples of past projects, meant to inspire rather than limit:
- The Pedagogy Toolkit
- Developing an open-source curriculum for a workshop on closing the gender gap in coding
- The Caroline Miniscule Mapping Project
- Digital archive of the “Digital Diasporas” conference at the University of Maryland
- Electronic Literature Timeline
Proposals may be for projects in a range of forms including, but not limited to, apps, plugins, and tools. All microgrant recipients will be required to write some kind of reflective output, typically a blog post, which will be published on the ACH website.
Graduate students and early stage researchers are encouraged to apply. Mentorship is available, either at the development stage of applications or during the projects themselves. Those interested in being paired with a mentor for the duration of the project should note in their application the area of skill or expertise in which they would benefit from mentoring.
Applications will be evaluated according to the following criteria:
- excellence and innovation of the proposal;
- contribution of the activity to development and promotion of the ACH mission;
- deliverables can be accomplished within the proposed budget and time period.
** Applicants must be members of the ACH <http://ach.org/> at the time of application **
Grants will be up to $1000. These are intended to be small grants that enable innovative activities by community members, such as graduate students, alt-ac faculty and staff, and junior faculty, who don’t have access to the resources of senior researchers. Projects should begin no later than three months after receipt of notification of acceptance and should conclude by 1 July 2017.
Applicants will be expected to report back to ACH within three months after the conclusion of the project. Applicants will also be expected to provide ACH with an appropriate Creative Commons license to any content to be posted, and open source software license for any code.
Proposals should be no longer than three pages (ca. 750 words) and should contain the following information:
- Name, background and full contact details of proposer (institutional affiliation, email address, etc).
- Name of organization (if the proposal is being submitted on behalf of an organization).
- Narrative addressing the criteria above, both conceptual and technical, with clear statement of deliverables, including the nature of the reflective output.
- Describe support needed from ACH, if needed.
- Budget justification that indicates clearly how the funds will be spent (no longer than ½ page). Projects must be feasible upon receipt of the microgrant. Any other resources needed to accomplish the project must be obtained in advance (though they may be contingent upon receipt of the ACH microgrant) and specified in the application. If the microgrant project is related to a larger project, explain the relationship.
- Date for project start date, date of conclusion, and for reflective output.
Should an early career scholar be barred, due to institutional policies, from holding a grant directly, another member of an affiliated institution may undertake to serve as grantholder, provided that the prospective grantholder guarantees in writing that the entire grant will be dedicated to the project for which it is awarded and that the individual(s) responsible for that project can be listed publicly by the ACH as having won the award, with the official grantholder mentioned parenthetically along with the institution.
No indirect costs may be deducted from the value of the grant, which must go entirely to support the project for which it is awarded.
Please send proposals or queries to microgrants{AT}ach{DOT}org by 15 November 2016. The Awards Committee will notify applicants of the status of their proposals by 1 December 2016.
Roopika Risam, for the Awards Committee: Brian Croxall, Élika Ortega, Micki Kaufman